‘So much the better,’ said Jack. ‘When I was a reefer in a ship of the line with a lot of others in the berth, we used to have set matches, and we challenged other ships in the squadron. So did the ratings.’
‘That must have been capital fun.’
‘So it was, indeed. Perhaps we might do something . . . what do you weigh?’
‘Almost nine stone, sir.’
‘We must see what can be done. Are you puffed with your climb?’
‘Not in the least, sir.’
‘Then let us go up to the crosstrees. You do not mind the height?’
‘Oh no, sir, I do not mind it.’
Jack turned him round, set him in position, both hands firm, and once again he called,
‘Away aloft.’ They moved briskly up the narrowing ladder, the shrouds so close at the top that Jack swung round to the larboard set, swung up to the larboard crosstree and gave the boy a hand to heave him up to the other. There they sat, one each side of the mast, each with an arm around it. They seemed incomparably higher up here, the sea stretching almost to infinity, the sky unimaginably vast: Horatio had opened his mouth to exclaim at the ethereal beauty of the ship and her setting when he remembered the words ‘mute and meek’ and shut it again. Jack said, ‘If the breeze comes a trifle more aft, you may see stunsails set. Now cling to the crosstree with both hands once I am under you, dangle your legs and let me place your feet.’
Down and down again: and on deck Jack said, ‘You did pretty well. Next time you must lay aloft with one of your mates – Mr. Daniel, say – and in a week you will find it as easy as kiss-my-hand.’
‘Sir, thank you very much indeed for taking me: I have never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. I wish it could go on for ever.’
He regretted these last words as being enthusiastic, out of place to a post-captain: but they had barely been uttered before they were drowned by a prodigious bellowing from the look-out on the foretopsail yard, a former (and most passionate) whaler. ‘There she blows! Oh there she blows! Three points on the starboard bow. Pardon me, sir,’ he added in a lower tone, for this was not a Royal Naval cry.
There she blew indeed – a great dark heave in the smooth sea and then the jet – and not only she but her six companions, one after another, heaving up enormous, blowing and smoothly diving each in turn, and each heartily cheered by the Surprises. ‘What kind, Reynolds?’ called Jack.
‘Oh right whales, sir, as right as right could be, ha, ha, ha!’
‘Why do they say right whales?’ asked William Salmon, a master’s mate, when the berth had settled down to dinner – a diminished berth, now that Jack had dispensed with some of the more indifferent midshipmen.
‘Why, because they are right in every respect,’ said Adams, Captain Aubrey’s clerk. ‘They are in the right place – off Greenland or in the Bay – they have the right whalebone, by far the best in the market – and the right amount of oil, six or seven tons of it. And the right temperament: they move slow, not dashing about like your finwhale, or turning spiteful and crushing your boat like a sperm. You cannot say fairer.’
‘No, to be sure,’ said the berth, looking eagerly at the pudding as it came through the door, a fine massive plum-duff. Officially, and actually in time of dearth, the midshipmen ate the same food as the other ratings, but since their captain insisted upon quite a considerable allowance those in Surprise did very much better, having laid in stores, livestock and even a moderate quantity of wine, some of which they drank at the end of the meal.
‘Here’s to a sweet and prosperous voyage,’ said Daniel, raising his glass.
‘A sweet and prosperous voyage,’ they echoed.
Sweet and prosperous it was, in a way, for although the breeze was now so faint the ship could hardly log more than a hundred miles from one noon to the next (a distance very accurately measured by Daniel and Hanson) it was wholly favourable, while the calmness of the sea, the almost unmoving deck, made gunnery a rare delight, and with his wealth of powder and shot (all to be renewed in Madeira) Jack exercised his crew with live ammunition, once they had loosened their muscles by running the guns in and out half a dozen times, and now each crew had the lively satisfaction of destroying a number of empty casks, towed out sometimes to a considerable distance. Then came the repeated broadsides: this was not the dumb-show of usual practice at divisions, but the shattering din of battle, the flashing stabs of fire, the shriek of each gun’s very dangerous recoil, the heady scent of powder-smoke along the decks; and there was the frigate, under her fighting topsails, in the midst of her own cloud as the breeze swept the smoke back across her -smoke lit from within, and an enormous, almost continuous roar as the firing started with the foremost starboard gun and ran right down the broadside. It was as though Surprise was fighting a dreadful battle of her own, the hands stripped to the waist, handkerchiefs round their heads, deadly serious, extremely active, checking the recoil, sponging, loading, ramming home the charge and running the ton of metal up against its port with a bang while the gun’s captain aimed it and the powder-boys ran at full speed with their cartridges from the magazine, while the deck trembled and the taut shrouds vibrated.
“Vast firing,’ called Jack as the aftermost gun shot inboard. ‘Swab and load and run them up. Now take breath while the target is towed out, and then let us have three brisk ones.’
Men straightened, grinned at one another, wiped their foreheads – their pale bodies gleamed with sweat – and most went to the scuttle-butt for a long and gasping drink.
When all was ready, guns loaded and run out, Jack said, in a voice suited to the battle-deafness of all hands, ‘Target’s away. From forward aft, as they bear.’ He spoke with a watch in his hand: most of the people knew what that meant, and the foremost gun was wonderfully prompt, followed by the rest of the broadside – a scene of extraordinary activity, since all his old shipmates were aware of the value he attached to very rapid accurate fire. ‘If a ship can manage three broadsides in five minutes, there is no enemy can stand against her,’ he had repeated many and many a time: and in the past he had proved it.
The target vanished in foam before the end of the first, but with undiminished zeal, toiling like devils, the other two broadsides pounded the wreckage until the last gun bawled out and a shocked silence fell over the sea.
‘Well, shipmates,’ said Jack, ‘it was pretty good: I do not think there are a great many afloat that could call us slow-bellies; but by the time we reach Freetown, I think we may do better.’
The Surprises looked a little disappointed, but none of the really expert gun-captains expected anything else; and even the heaviest of the few new hands had seen that guns three and five had checked the pure, even sequence of the broadsides.
‘It was pretty good, however, for a somewhat mixed ship’s company,’ said Jack as he walked into the great cabin. ‘But I tell you what, Stephen: the wind is about to change.’ He tapped the barometer. ‘Yes: and before nightfall, too. Come in.’
‘I beg pardon, sir,’ said Wells, the dwarfish midshipman, ‘but Mr. Harding says, with his duty, that Ringle is in sight, under a press of sail, bearing east-north-east.’
‘Thank you, Mr. Wells. Now, Mr. Adams, what have you there?’
‘Sir, the young gentlemen’s workings, if you please. The master begged me to carry them to you, as I was on my way aft. He has to go to the seat of ease again.’
Stephen shook his head: Mr. Woodbine was one of his most obstinate cases. Was there perhaps some hidden or at least contributory cause? Patients were either intolerably garrulous about their symptoms or obscure, taciturn, even secretive, as though they suspected the medical man of trying to entrap them – perhaps even to lead them to surgery. When he had finished with these reflections, his eye caught the score of a prelude and fugue in D minor for violin and ‘cello that he had composed some time ago and that he had now copied fair, profiting by the calm.
Jack, sorting through the young gentlemen’s workings -their reckoning of the ship’s position by noon observation of the sun and a variety of other calculations – caught Stephen’s glance and said, ‘I have been making attempts on the opening page of the prelude: but Lord, Stephen, I am grown so thumb-fisted! I have scarcely had my fiddle out of its case since we sank the land, and now most of my notes are false and my bowing all astray.’